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Amazon adds Cloudfront to their web console

I love Amazon S3. It’s so versatile and can fill a multitude of roles in your web work flow. Need secure backup? Check. Need to create a shared space across multiple computers and locations? Check. Need a place to quickly serve your videos, graphics, CSS, podcasts, javascript and more? Check. One complaint I read about delivering media quickly over S3 was a bit of latency, so Amazon addressed that.

Last year, they announced their Cloudfront product, which is a content delivery network that sits on top of S3. S3 is pretty fast, but Cloudfront, for extra cost, is even faster, especially internationally. I blogged about CloudFront here last year, and have used it for several projects at my institution.

The challenge was getting up and running with Cloudfront. There just wasn’t an easy way, other then API calls or a browser add-on like S3Fox, to designate content that one wanted served from Cloudfront.

As of yesterday, Amazon has added Cloudfront tools to their great management console. Now, you can easily create new Cloudfront distributions and manage them from one central location. It’s a great addition, and one I think will help increase the usage of this nice product.